Title: Stirring the Sheets
Author: Chad Lutzke
Edition: Paperback
Page Count: 130 pages
Rating: 5 / 5 ✨✨✨✨✨
Short Summary:
An elderly funeral home worker, struggling with the loss of his wife, finds an unnatural attraction to a corpse at work resembling his late bride in her younger years.
A story of desperation, loneliness and letting go.
“This is about hating yourself enough to go to extremes. It’s about surviving, when all you want to do is wake up dead.“
Ouch, my heart.
This is my first book by Chad Lutzke, and it definitely won’t be my last. I love things that make me sad – like, the more devastating a book is, the more I’ll love it, because it’ll destroy me and for some weird reason, I like being wrecked by my literature.
I have “a lot of feelings”, and reading about other people dealing with having a lot of feelings too makes me feel less alone, I guess? Loneliness is a funny thing.
Our protagonist in this story, Emmett, knows a thing or two about loneliness. After losing his wife, he struggles to find a reason to go on, and falls into a routine he relies on to get through his daily mourning. The sadness and grief that tinge every single aspect of Emmett’s life are palpable things, almost characters in the story by themselves. You feel them in everything, from the way he wakes up in the morning to the way he shies away from anything resembling moving on from his beloved – it’s so heartbreaking, and so real.
What stuns me the most about this is how well Lutzke’s been able to tell such a full story in such a small package. With novellas, it can be hard to propel a character’s development forward, and to even flesh them out enough to envision a future for them beyond the ending at all. For Lutzke to be able to do that – and more, honestly, in my opinion – in just 130 pages is amazing, and really puts this on another level for me.
Highly recommended, and I can’t wait to read more by him! I already have a couple lined up… 😍
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I’m so glad you loved this so much! I’ve read 2 works by him now — one short story, which I adored, and one full novella, which didn’t work for me much, sadly — so I’ve been trying to determine what to pick up next, and I think it might have to be this one. I’m like you in that I really love being given all the feels by books, especially in the horror genre, so this sounds perfect! Amazing review, lovely ♥